“The twice-yearly task of publishing a large and sensitive document is out of scale with virtually all of the rest of its publication activities,” said the investigation, which was hastily carried out by peer Sarah Hogg and OBR board member and City bigwig Susan Rice.
It called for “completely new arrangements” to be put in place for the publication of market-sensitive documents, and urged the Treasury to pay “greater attention” to the need for adequate support when funding the OBR.
The watchdog said that given its small size, it used an outside web developer to upload its contents. It found multiple attempts by outside parties to access the document before it was published, by guessing the URL, and also revealed there was a successful attempt to do so in an earlier major March publication.
On Nov. 26, the day of the budget, there were 44 unsuccessful requests to the URL between 5.16 and 11.30 a.m. as the document had not yet been uploaded.
Between 11.30 and 11.35 a.m., the web developer began uploading documents to the draft area of the OBR’s website, which the watchdog believed was not publicly accessible. At 11.35 a.m., an IP address which had made 32 previous unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the site accessed it for the first time successfully.
Six minutes later, at 11.41 a.m., Reuters sent a news alert reporting the government would raise taxes by £26.1 billion by 2029-2030. The URL was then widely accessed by journalists, markets and other parties between 11.30 a.m. and 12.08 p.m., after which it was removed by the OBR.